The "Childmyths" blog is a spin-off of Jean Mercer's book "Thinking Critically About Child Development: Examining Myths & Misunderstandings"(Sage, 2015; third edition). The blog focuses on parsing mistaken beliefs that can influence people's decisions about childrearing-- for example, beliefs about day care, about punishment, about child psychotherapies, and about adoption.
See also http://thestudyofnonsense.blogspot.com

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Monday, December 16, 2013

"Victorious Occultism": Unconscionable Treatment of Infants in Russia, and Matching Attitudes in the U.S.

Over the last few weeks I have been sent a lot of
news by Yulia Massino and Nina Sokolova, two Russian women who are very
concerned about potentially harmful “New Age” practices related to childbirth
and child-rearing. Much as I sympathize with these problems in Russia, I’m
equally disturbed about the fact that the United States is also home to related
belief systems and practices. The less centralized government of the U.S. may
make it even more difficult than it is in Russia to regulate treatment of pregnant
women and infants in ways that will prevent harm, and American views of
tolerance for religious-based practices may have a similar effect.

For those of us with little or no Russian, being at
the mercy of Google Translate can make news from Russia quite confusing. For
example, the name of a Russian birthing center is translated as “erysipelas”
(an unpleasant skin disease), which has nothing to do with any of the problems
to be dealt with. However, with repeated readings some information does filter
through.

First, let’s have a look at the practice of “water
births”, as espoused by a number of earlier mystical thinkers like Mme.
Blavatsky, but practiced in the 1980s by one I.B. Charkovsky (see https://translate.google.ru/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&js=n&prev_t&hl=ru&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Flena-malaa.livejournal.com%2F45160.html&act=url.
As all observers of the “New Age” know, this technique involves having the
laboring mother more or less immersed in water, so the baby emerges into a
water environment. As humans are lung-breathers, this situation would be fatal
if the baby were kept underwater too long, but in fact, because there is no air
in the uterus, at birth the infant has its lungs and respiratory passages
filled with amniotic fluid and mucus. Although much if this fluid has been
squeezed out by pressure during a vaginal delivery, babies usually need some
help in draining and suctioning the liquid that impedes breathing of air. Born
into water or air, the baby has the same possibility of needing assistance to
start breathing air. (Anecdotally, I’ve come across some accounts of infants
being slow to start breathing on their own if born into warm water, but I know
of no systematic study of this issue.)

What was Charkovsky’s reasoning about water births? The claims for both spiritual
and physical benefits were numerous and can be seen at the link given above.
(One interesting one is the idea that women giving birth in water experience
orgasms at the time; I will leave this ludicrous suggestion to the imagination
of women who have had babies.) Having persuaded himself and others that water
births were beneficial, Charkovsky carried his reasoning further, to claim that
sick infants and children could be cured by repeated immersion in icy water,
and that this would prevent or cure mental retardation. The immersion is
repeated rapidly with scarcely the opportunity for a breath between dips, thus
closely resembling the torture practice of “waterboarding”.

I don’t think we have to fall for the idea that all
problems are caused by trauma to realize that such a practice has the potential
for powerful traumatic effects. It’s clear that newborn babies, especially less
mature ones, can respond to being chilled with a cascade of internal responses
that can include brain damage from increased blood flow toward the brain and
death of intestinal tissue from a reduced blood supply there. As for older
infants and children, the terror of this experience must be greatly multiplied
by the awareness that a parent is nearby and does not stop what is happening. Why,
then, would any parent choose this treatment? Part of the answer presumably has
to do with the sad readiness of desperate parents to follow any guru who offers
hope, but in addition I think we have to look to common metaphors of
contamination as the cause of illness and washing as a health measure-- and these we see in the myth of Achilles, who
was dipped into a river to make him invulnerable (except that that heel did not
get wet), or in the custom of baptism by total immersion. These familiar ideas
may prepare parents to accept what would otherwise be seen as a bizarre and dangerous
practice.

Another practice advocated by those who recommend water
births is “baby yoga”. The link above contains very disturbing photos of
extremely young infants whose limbs have been forced into “yoga postures” (and
I should point out that in the newborn the hips are not nearly as flexible as
you might think, with a limit on the movement of the leg that gradually
decreases until at 5 or 6 months the
baby can pull the foot to the mouth ). How this was done, or what the occurrence
of hip dislocations was, is not made clear.

But there is even more to “baby yoga” than this.
Some readers will already have come across the claim that babies can be made
extra strong by adults who essentially fling the babies around, holding on by one hand or one foot as the baby
shrieks. A discussion and some footage of this can be seen at http://www.thedoctorstv.com/videolib/init/6483
(why do these guys have to wear scrubs to be on TV, I wonder?). Elena Fokina, a
proponent of “baby yoga” and of Charkovsky’s methods, is presently the subject
of an on line petition: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/978/068/511/stop-lena-fokinas-pracitce-of-baby-yoga/.
(Yes,”pracitce” is what it says.)

Unfortunately, the criminal charges for the shooting
incident described in the link above were not emphasized in a Daily Mail (www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2471806/Rusian-breastfeeding-expert-arrested-cult-leader.html)
article that claimed that breastfeeding was an uncommon practice in Russia and
that Tzaregradskaya was being hounded for encouraging breastfeeding rather than
for persuading families to avoid medical care. This was, I think, less a matter
of reportage than of carrying on with the current cross-fire of political pop-guns
between Russia and the West.

Obviously, Russia has some difficulty controlling
practices that are potentially dangerous to women and children, but that are
easily framed as “ancient wisdom” or “the ways of our ancestors”. What about
the United States? Do we have similar difficulties? Yes, and many of them also
derive from what is now called the “New Age”, but is actually identical with
the “New Thought” of the 1880s (yes, that’s the correct century). ( Some others,
like the advice of Michael and Debi Pearl of Tennessee or of the now-diminished
“Baby Wise” group, are descendants of Calvinistic views of submission and
obedience to parents as analogous to the Christian’s submission to God. ) Among
the “New Age” group the paramount organization is the Association for Pre- and
Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), whose members have fostered Lloyd
DeMause’s beliefs in the “poisonous placenta” and its psychological damage as
well as the position taken by Stanislav
Grof that LSD or oxygen deprivation could yield true pictures of experiences
during gestation and birth (rather than images of what someone imagined
gestation and birth to have been like). The APPPAH member David Chamberlain has
claimed that all children recall all the details of their births and even
earlier events, while another member, William Emerson, specializes in massaging
young infant’s heads and necks so they will re-experience the pains of their
birth and “cry out” those traumas. Emerson’s viewpoint is an example of the
belief held by some of these people, that infant crying is a necessary way of
getting rid of negative emotion and should not lead to attempts to comfort or
soothe the baby—an ideal of indifference to the child that also seems displayed
in the Charkovsky cold-water method.

State laws in the U.S. do not prohibit the teaching
of most such beliefs or the use of potentially dangerous methods for birth or
for child-rearing-- especially if it is
claimed, as it is both here and in Russia, that there is some religious
principle associated with a practice. Although it would be possible for
professional organizations in medicine and mental health to ban the use of
these methods by members, and to make efforts to educate the public about the
practices, this has only very rarely been done. In fact, the ethics code of the
American Psychological Association discourages such moves by requiring
psychologists who object to a therapy to speak directly to one of its
proponents in an attempt to resolve the conflict, rather than ”going public’.

A prominent Russian thinker has used the term “victorious
occultism” to describe the situation in Russia. We’ve got it here, too, and the
only way out I can see is for concerned people to speak up loudly.

Water births have, alas, proved to be a lethal practice. The hot tub water not something you want going into a newborn's lungs. The infant can also become seriously chilled.

Amy Tuteur ("SkepticOB") – a good source of information on the dangers of home birthing in the USA – has written about this irresponsible "natural" birthing practice:

"The most critical task for the newborn is to take its first breath. Inhaling a mouthful of fecally contaminated water instead of air is profoundly dangerous....Neonates can and do inhale copious amounts of fecally contaminated water during waterbirth. Indeed, they have been found to inhale such large quantities of water that the water dilutes the concentration of sodium in the bloodstream to fatally low levels (hyponatremia). Even small amounts of inhaled water can introduce significant amounts of bacteria into the neonatal lungs leading to pneumonia and other infections..."

Most are "Certified Professional Midwives" (CPMs) who are essentially lay midwives. (They should NOT be confused with Europe's midwives or America's nurse midwives who have formal training and experience.) CPMs need only follow around other CPMs for a few dozen deliveries and take a certification exam. They claim to be "experts in natural births." It is likely they have little or no significant experience with handling emergencies, which is the most important reason for having a birth attendant.

Our lay midwives, like those in Russia, tend to be religiously or ideologically motivated; many are radical feminists who consider transferring a laboring woman to the "male-dominated" medical system or have a c-section to be a "failed birth."

CPMs claim their practices are cheaper and safer than hospital care. The Midwife Association of North America has collected years' of data on the perinatal mortality rate of their member CPMs, but is not releasing that data. One state, Colorado, is required to collect data on CPMs as a condition of re-registration, revealing that their perinatal death rate has reached 15 times what should be expected of uncomplicated pregnancies.

CPMs have a host of bizarre beliefs and practices, including:

* Offering laboring women only homeopathics for pain and refusing their requests to be transferred to a hospital.

* "Power birth": telling the woman to begin pushing when she is only 5cm dilated.

* "Placenta medicine": Charging around $100 to make the placenta into capsule form to ease postpartum blues, and aid other conditions.

* "Lotus birth": Not cutting the umbilical cord, but carrying it around with the infant until it drops off on its own in a couple weeks. CPMs give hints on how to deal with the smell.

Colorado state disciplinary records indicated that CPMs lack the most basic knowledge of OB, e.g. two CPMs did nothing about spikes in blood pressure in women who apparently went on to develop a life-threatening condition called preeclampsia.

For more information, see "Hurt by Homebirth" website has personal stories:http://hurtbyhomebirth.blogspot.com/

I think it is not necessary to believe Russian women if they say "It does not hurt." Self-sacrifice is a part of Russian culture. Women are capable of great suffering and do not consider it necessary to complain if there was a successful outcome. It is necessary to talk to women who have had bad water birth. If the child is healthy but the woman is forced to be treated for a long time after these genera ...... she would say that everything was OK.

I don't think one has to be Russian to forget the pain of childbirth. We are all fortunate to be able to forget pain and not be able to imagine it when it is not happening. But you're right, this is not good evidence that there was no pain at the time.

About Me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Mercer

Jean Mercer has a Ph.D in Psychology from Brandeis University, earned when that institution was 20 years old (you do the math). She is Professor Emerita of Psychology at Richard Stockton College, where for many years she taught developmental psychology, research methods, perception, and history of psychology. Since about 2000 her focus has been on potentially dangerous child psychotherapies, and she has published several related books and a number of articles in professional journals.
Her CV can be seen at http://childmyths.blogspot.com/2009/12/curriculum-vitae-jean.mercer-richard.html.